The ATM Forum has introduced a Loop Emulation Service-Embedded Operation Channel (LES-EOC) specification for managing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) using an inband management channel. The LES-EOC specification describes the interaction between a voice gateway and a CPE device operating in a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) environment. The LES-EOC specification is CPE-centric, in that it defines the interaction solely from the point of view of the CPE.
The LES-EOC specification is designed as an inband management channel to manage the CPE by tunneling management requests through the voice gateway via the LES-EOC. Each CPE device connected to a gateway device uses the same SNMP Management Information Base (MIB) and may contain the same set of SNMP Object Identifiers. A simple master/sub-agent implementation requires that each sub-agent implements a completely unique set of OIDs. But in this implementation, the same OIDs may actually exist for multiple CPEs. Thus, the OIDs cannot be used to route to different CPEs. The use of OIDs based routing as utilized by the master/sub-agent implementation cannot be used to solve this CPE reach-ability problem. In traditional communications networks, SNMP devices are assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address, but it would be impractical to assign an IP address for the hundreds of thousands or even millions of CPE devices that may be present in a network of gateway devices. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a method for uniquely addressing a particular CPE that fulfills all of the requirements of the LES-EOC specification.